Tuesday, September 26, 2017

History is more than 'silly putty' to be shaped by egomaniacs in their own image

The “power” of elected or appointed office, and the
“status” of income, personal address, wardrobe, executive title are too often
misused by those who are convinced they possess such power and status. In small
towns, elevated “position” and elevated “income” are often
ascribed/worn/claimed/flaunted by the same people.

And it is not only through their attitudes, actions
and words today that they abuse their power; their influence has written most
of the history books read and studied by young people in schools. It has also
generated the myths of “status and culture” that are passed down from
generation to generation. Their legacy in entombed in the names and the bills
and the buildings and the athletic stadiums, the performing arts halls, and the
graduate schools, especially the business schools bearing their names. The
appropriate and conventional public attitude to such benefaction is extreme
gratitude. And to some degree, these facilities might not exist, except for
their donors, even if the donations are undoubtedly tax deductions.

One of the more noxious examples of the unwarranted
abuse of power came in a memo from then Ontario premier, Mike Harris, to the
scholar at Queen’s charged with writing the next edition of the grade 9 history
text for Ontario schools. According to the memo, no accomplishments of women,
labour or indigenous people were to be included in the text. I recall feeling
shocked and incredulous when I first learned about the memo. My naivete and
innocence precluded my previous embrace of such a directive.

With the rising public tensions over public statutes,
like the one over the statute to Cornwallis in Halifax, and the several
Confederate monuments in the U.S. South, the issue of how “privilege” dominates
not only on the stock market, and in the corporate board rooms, in the
university boards and institutional trusts, and also how that influence infuses
the tone, the words, the images and thereby the myths on which we are raised.

This weekend, trump, having no other more pressing issues
lying in piles on his Oval Office desk, urged NFL owners to fire those players
who knelt during the playing of the national anthem, since he considers such
defiance an act of disloyalty to the realm. Of course, players, coaches and
even owners responded variously by kneeling, linking arms, absenting their
whole teams from the field until the anthem ended and generally thumbing their
nose at the president’s attempt to divide the league. (Let’s not forget that
the first NFL player to protest how blacks are treated especially by law
enforcement in the U.S., Colin Kaepernink, has been black-balled by the league
and no team has found it in their moral or ethical compass to offer him a
contract, even when they needed a quarterback.) And then, after witnessing the
defiance of his intrusion into league deportment, for trump to declare that the
issue “has nothing to do with race” is such a complete perversion of the facts
to suit his need to control history that it casts an additional layer of
contempt on the president.

In their attempt to minimize the complexities of
conflict in their departments, some executives declare (blindly and boldly) “We
are starting from today, and everything that has happened in the past is to be
wiped off the desk as if it never happened.” As if to reduce human beings and
their evolving issues (including personnel issues) to a single slice of a cell
on a microscope plate, in order to analyse the component parts, in sterility
and from the perspective of complete control, these men and women are
committing a very serious mistake, both in their assessment of reality and in
their potential to “fix” the problem.

History refuses to comply with such reductionisms. And
for that we can be thankful. Just as trump’s “cause” has been reduced to “respect
for the flag” (after he has shown such exaggerated contempt for the American
judicial system, the State Department, the Health and Human Services
Department, the Housing and Urban Development Department, The Director of the
F.B.I., and the dignity of the Oval Office) the issue of racism refuses to be
silenced.

History, of the kind that journalism begins, and
scholars dig deeply into the archives, the documents and more recently the
video and digital archives to find, has attracted many of the best minds in all
generations. Revisionist history comes from public “information” departments in
government, or from the public relations arms of political parties and
corporations. Some scholars have seen history as coming from a variety of
academic perspectives: economic, geographic, single human agency (the strong
man/woman, either shaping events or being shaped by events into the leader s/he
became), religious, ethnic, political, scientific, or perhaps cultural. In a
recent column in truthdig.com, Chris Hedges references Nietsche’s reflection on
three varieties of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical.

The first, monumental, focuses on the monuments that
have been erected to laud and honour certain individuals or their ‘historic’
contributions. Apparently, a revision of their respective ‘contributions’ is
taking place across North America, as specifics of some of their negative and
nefarious traits are surfaced from a new and more critical perspective.
Antiquarian history, the kind that is removed from context, supports the
“ancestry” movement, and the filling in of empty lines on family trees. There
is no attempt to discern the conditions under which those names made choices,
moved from place to place, attended which schools, or entered which occupations,
nor suffered from which diseases, nor belonged to which groups or political
parties. Both ‘monumental’ and ‘antiquarian’ categories of history pale in
their complexity to Nietsche’s third: critical.

And in a time when power is so ubiquitous, money and
status so redolent, and reductionisms to favour personal bias so permitted and
present, critical history suffers a kind of daily pumelling, if not by direct
hits, then certainly by glancing blows, most of which are unnoticed except by
those professional practitioners whose focus is the preservation and the
elevation of the best standards of the “historic” pursuit.

Ironically, it is only through the lens of the
“critical” historian that we can better grasp the full reality of where we are,
when we are, how we got here, and how we might extricate ourselves from our
worst and most dangerous entanglements. Calling the disclosure of “critical”
assessments of current or past public events “fake news” will never obliterate
their truth, nor eviscerate the inherent motive for truth that underpins human
existence. The diligence of courageous reporters, and the unqualified support
of editors who can and will continue to discern facts from bullshit
(propaganda, political opportunism, distractions, and the many other techniques
to paint mascara over their errors deployed by the powerful), along with
publishers who are unaffected by the taunts and the threats to withdraw
advertising dollars because of unfavourable coverage are pillars of democracy
that we must never take for granted.

Critical history, also, cannot and must not be
replaced by monumental history, nor by antiquarian history. Comedian Stephen
Colbert’s retort to trump’s ‘taking the knee has nothing to do with racism’ in
these words, “that’s like saying Gandhi’s hunger strikes were a protest against
snacking”….qualifies in the current context as “critical history”….and there is
an insatiable need and appetite for critical history.

We have already suffered enough through the lies,
cover-ups, distortions and denials of ‘significant’ people including:

·both
Holocaust and Global warming deniers, political decisions to “improve health
care for all” under the guise of a tax cut for the rich, and also a

· promise to “fix” everything by a man whose
history is to have torched everything he ever touched

·a
promise to restore coal jobs to miners who have lost them, when everyone knows
that is another cotton candy ‘delivery’

Sadly, the list is growing weak under the weight of
its own lies….and there is no sign of a let-up in the pattern before 2020, when
we can only hope that an authentic person with at least a modicum of integrity
will find and receive the support of the American people.

Written in the 1958, a novel entitled “The Ugly
American” by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer depicts an American ambassador
to Southeast Asia whose powers of discernment allow him to see the conflict he
is there to help resolve as one between communism and democracy. By the time he
is able to see a more nuanced and complicated “reality” it is too late. The
Peace Corps was established, in part, as a Kennedy response to the novel, aimed
at portraying and displaying a much more effective and responsible voice and
face of America in foreign lands. Ambassador MacWhite, from the novel, would
likely have a more reasonable and nuanced perspective on the issues facing the
Oval Office today than the current occupant.

So, from the perspective of north of the 49th
parallel, one has to ask, “Have the Americans really elected the archetype of
‘the ugly American” as an expression of the collective ugliness of their
country? Co-incidentally, daily I am one of several cars that line up for a
ferry from an island in the St. Lawrence River, to return to the mainland. The
island lies between the U.S. and the Canadian border, and just a few minutes
ago, while turning the corner to board the ferry, I found an American tourist
cutting into the line in his motorhome.

I was so strongly tempted to get out and tell him I
was confident he had voted for trump…although my instinct for getting home
unscathed prevailed. As a young boy, I lived and worked in a town overrun by
American tourists, and in those many years, I encountered none of the brash
rudeness of today’s encounter, nor the simpleton reductionism of MacWhite from
the novel.

A critical ‘take’ on history is necessary not only
historians, journalists, editors, ambassadors, legal scholars and especially
the occupant of the Oval Office. Anything less than a substantive grasp of the
truth of the past, the complexity of human beings and their legendary issues,
the capacity to continue to learn and debate issues from a variety of
perspectives, ideologies and intellectual files as well as the insight to
accurately and honestly reflect on the calculus of each potential option in
every situation….these comprise a minimum list of requirements for the most
important office in the world. And the current occupant fails on each account.

It took Obama to begin to restore America’s good name
and reputation following the debacle that was George w. and his war in Iraq. It
took John F. Kennedy and Sergeant Shriver (Kennedy’s appointee to generate the
Peace Corps) to begin to rebuild America’s good name and reputation following
the Burdick/Lederer novel. Following WWII, the Americans mounted the Marshall
Plan, to help rebuild devastated towns, cities and factories in Europe.

What will it take to heal the cancerous tumor that is
infesting the American ship of state in 2017, and likely for at least the next
three years?

Tweeting about flags, monuments, crooked Hillary or
any of several other opponents (the appetite for targets is so demonstrably
insatiable that it suggests a wild man in a shooting gallery with never enough
targets to take out) is so reprehensible and so ugly and so despicable as to
paint the American “face” with gothic and threatening paint, every day, without
the playfulness of Hall’o’ween….

The world’s foundational grounding in a common, shared
and credible, if often tragic, history is being eroded minute by minute and the
process is deliberate, willful, co-ordinated and cumulative…and all of it
destined to burnish the apple of the reputation of a single dangerous man…..Is
there anyone else who is both shocked and now growing more frightened by this
spectacle that seems unstoppable?